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Documentary, The Victorians Part: 4
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00:00By the second half of the 19th century, the Victorians had built a nation that was the richest and most powerful on earth.
00:16Britain's painters celebrated Britain's triumphs.
00:19And yet, just when the Victorian miracle was at its peak, came voices of doubt, of anxiety and even of protest.
00:34Science began to gnaw away at religious beliefs, throwing the certainties of the Victorian world into question.
00:49Now, artists began to talk of waging a war on the machine age.
00:55And they looked beyond the triumphs of the 19th century for inspiration.
01:00To intoxicating dreams.
01:03To sensuality.
01:06To the imagination.
01:10To nightmares and madness itself.
01:14Even to a world beyond the grave.
01:20And they would open the doors to a new age of uncertainty.
01:24An uncertainty we still live with today.
01:26An uncertainty we still live with today.
01:27An uncertainty we still live with today.
01:28on't we
01:35Everybody.
01:37Authenticbildung
01:38If you find two of the details, I am allussenery.
01:42For divorce and terror
01:43To lots of things, I do not care.
01:44Ist
01:48足ids
01:51Fear
01:54今日
01:56The wilds of Northumberland are a fitting place for a vision of apocalypse.
02:12Among these rocks and hillsides grew up an extraordinary painter
02:17whose mind seethed with troubling visions.
02:26To John Martin, this craggy, dramatic landscape was the work of a vengeful, violent god,
02:36a biblical wilderness in which the relationship between God and man
02:40was played out over the centuries.
02:45And John Martin had a warning for his times.
02:48He'd spent his childhood in the little village of Hayden Bridge.
03:00Like many Victorian children, he was dragged by his mother to church
03:05not once but twice each Sunday.
03:08It's a pretty austere place and Isabella Martin's faith matched the bleakness of the building.
03:27She preached a fierce sermon that there was a God to serve and a hell to shun
03:32and that sinners and swearers would burn in hell with the devil and his angels.
03:46Wild landscape and terrifying religion combined to produce something astonishing.
03:52As he looked around, he saw not glory but catastrophe.
04:11His pictures prophesied the end of Victorian civilization.
04:16His pictures prophesied the end of Victorian civilization.
04:22John Martin's apocalyptic paintings show the uncontrollable power of nature
04:30and warn of the fate awaiting the Victorians.
04:40In the last judgment, the world is riven asunder.
04:45The saved in their Sunday best on one side,
04:49the damned on the other.
04:52A steam train, that symbol of Victorian progress,
04:59falls flaming into the abyss.
05:03And in the great day of his wrath,
05:07Martin depicts the fate of humanity.
05:11Victorian civilization will be destroyed,
05:14obliterated by God's fury.
05:16These may be religious pictures,
05:21but the religious beliefs of the age were beginning to crumble.
05:26New questions were being asked which would shake the foundations of Victorian certainty.
05:48All over the country and here at Pegwell Bay in Kent,
05:58enthusiastic amateurs were spending their weekends fossil hunting at the seaside.
06:04Armed with hammers and magnifying glasses,
06:07they set out to record and classify the fossils that they found in rocks and stones and cliffs.
06:13In the process, those hammers were chipping away at once rock-solid convictions.
06:23Until the 1850s, most people, if they thought about it at all, believed the world was about 6,000 years old.
06:35According to the calculations of a long-dead bishop, God created the world on Sunday, October the 23rd, 4004 B.C.
06:46But now the fossil hunters, vickers and priests among them,
06:52were discovering that couldn't possibly be true.
06:56This is a fantastic fossil. Is it from around here?
07:00Yes, this ammonite is from a local beach here.
07:02This is only a small proportion of the animal.
07:04It would have been a much bigger fossil originally,
07:06maybe even a metre and a half and across.
07:08We've only got the sort of small central portion here.
07:10And are there still fossils to be found here?
07:12Yes, it's a very rich location.
07:14The magic is still here that drew the Victorians down.
07:17The quality of the fossils that come out of this very soft rock is still very high.
07:20And they're easily removed.
07:22This is amazingly soft. What is it?
07:24Well, it's actually plant remains, an algal bloom.
07:28All this white stuff, even the finest powder.
07:30So essentially the entire rock face we're looking at is just one giant fossil.
07:34So you're a Victorian clergyman.
07:36You pick this out of a cliff.
07:39And you can't possibly reconcile it with the Bible, can you?
07:41There is your conundrum.
07:42There is no modern equal to the sort of things that we're going through
07:45in terms of trying to square off what they were actually seeing with their blatant beliefs.
07:50It's like a mental nuclear explosion or something.
07:52It was that serious, isn't it?
07:53It must have been.
07:53It must have been.
07:54But I say we have no parallels to data to even comprehend what they must have been going through.
07:59Discoveries are happening all the time.
08:00So they're genuinely making new discoveries?
08:03Yep, indeed.
08:03Because these cliffs are always eroding back.
08:06And essentially what you're looking at here is, if you like, the very edges of a page of geological time.
08:12So every now and again a single letter drops off.
08:15And if you're lucky enough to be here to catch that, you may end up putting a few of them together and tell a story.
08:20And that story told by the rocks was a disquieting one.
08:26One painting hints at it.
08:45It looks like just an autumn day at the seaside.
08:49But it's more than that.
08:50It shows the family of the artist William Dice on the beach at Pegwell Bay.
08:58Dice himself was a keen geologist and astronomer.
09:04The women comb the beach for fossils.
09:07How many millions of years had those fossils been there?
09:14A man cranes his neck towards the sky to get a glimpse of a comet.
09:20What was our place in the universe?
09:24The location is significant.
09:26Here, Christianity first arrived in Britain.
09:30Now the question was, how long would it last?
09:35The writer John Ruskin voiced a very Victorian anxiety in 1851.
09:42If only the geologist would leave me alone, I could do very well.
09:47But those dreadful hammers.
09:50I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.
10:02He was right to worry.
10:04The comforting myths of the Bible were being destroyed by a new belief in science.
10:17This is one of the grandest of the Victorian cathedrals to science.
10:22The Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
10:25The whole building is a hymn to scientific endeavour.
10:30Every column is carved from a different British rock.
10:42Every capital shows a different plant.
10:47As for the specimens, they're testament to the Victorian spirit of inquiry.
10:57It was 19th century scientists who coined the word dinosaur in 1842.
11:06There was nothing new in finding skeletons, of course, but when scientists looked closely at the bones, they discovered something much more urgent.
11:18Clues to the staggering age of the world.
11:21To how life had developed.
11:23Bones, in other words, could be very, very worrying things.
11:28In this picture, parts of a skeleton have resurfaced in a graveyard.
11:42Can the promises of scripture be true when this is what we are reduced to?
11:48Now begins the age of doubt with a capital D.
11:59The Bible promises eternal life, but she seems not so sure.
12:07The picture's full of symbolic detail.
12:11The dead man is named John Faithfull.
12:17On his skull, there's a butterfly, symbol of resurrection.
12:22The painting posed an uncomfortable question.
12:26What can we believe anymore?
12:35Well might they ask, Charles Darwin was about to demonstrate the creation myths of the Bible must be nonsense.
12:45Here at the Oxford Museum of Natural History, religion and science met head-on.
12:53In one corner, Professor T. H. Huxley, nicknamed Darwin's bulldog.
12:59In the other, the bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, known as Soapy Sam.
13:07They were here to discuss Darwin's electrifying theory that species, instead of being individually created by God, evolved by natural selection, so-called survival of the fittest.
13:18The bishop began.
13:20He said, you claim we're descended from apes.
13:22In your case, is it on your grandfather's side or your grandmother's side?
13:28According to legend, Huxley replied, I'd rather be descended from an ape than a bishop.
13:34In later life, the professor could only recall that he had said he had no shame in being descended from an ape, but he would be ashamed to be associated with someone who used his great gifts to obscure a truth.
13:48It was a stunning moment, so stunning, that one woman in the audience passed out and had to be carried away.
13:55The implications of Victorian science proved overwhelming for others too.
14:03Some of the best artists of the day sought escape elsewhere in a magical past.
14:16They found a gentler, more romantic world in a medieval fantasy of damsels, knights and chivalry as far away as possible from science and industry.
14:32One story drew them over and over again.
14:44The Lady of Shalot is the tale of a medieval damsel marooned in a tower and her doomed love for Sir Lancelot.
14:55She looks out of the window at him and brings a curse upon herself.
15:02The Lady of Shalot
15:07The Lady of Shalot
15:12Such pictures seemed to satisfy a hunger in the weary Victorian soul.
15:18A hunger for the spiritual and the romantic.
15:21The Lady of Shalot
15:27This love affair with all things medieval could be taken to wonderful extremes.
15:37Cardiff Castle is a whopping great medieval extravaganza built to keep the Victorian world at bay.
15:50It was dreamt up by two men.
15:53A wealthy industrialist, the Marquess of Bute.
16:00And the architect, William Burgess.
16:05Now at the time, Lord Bute had a reputation as the richest man in the world, so money really was no object.
16:12Burgess's challenge then, completely to recreate a medieval castle, was the commission of a lifetime.
16:23Bute and Burgess were men with a vision on a truly grand scale.
16:32A vision of a world before Charles Darwin had asked those awkward questions.
16:37The place is an absolute labyrinth. This room, for example, guarded by the devil to keep the ladies out, is the winter smoking room.
16:48It's covered in images of animals. Even the door handle is a parrot. There are animals and birds all over the walls.
16:58But these aren't animals and birds as seen by 19th century scientists. They're as seen by medieval monks.
17:05In other words, proof of God's creation.
17:11And this is the small dining room. Mundane name for a room that's anything but mundane.
17:17Look at the detail. A howler monkey. When you want to summon the servants, press the nut in its mouth.
17:23And here's the riposte to Darwin. A book showing human learning in the hands of two monkeys who patently hadn't the faintest idea what to do with it.
17:50So, to you, Mr Darwin.
18:05And here's a fireplace built in the shape of the Norman keep in the grounds.
18:09And look, inside it, William the Conqueror's son held prisoner as he'd been held prisoner in the real keep.
18:15No home's complete with that one, really.
18:20But what looks like something from the past was built on the profits of a very modern world.
18:27The irony is, of course, that it was all paid for by one of the age's richest industrialists.
18:33What made this medieval fantasy possible was the toil of Welsh miners.
18:39One Victorian artist led a call to arms against Victorian values.
19:00The avowed wish of Edward Byrne Jones was to wage a crusade and holy war against the age.
19:10The more materialistic science becomes, he declared, the more angels I shall paint.
19:24Executing this picture obsessed him all his life.
19:34Mortally wounded in battle, the dying King Arthur is watched over by three queens in the magical isle of Avalon.
19:48There, legend had it that he would sleep until one day in the hour of England's need, he was summoned again.
19:57It's a strange, melancholy masterpiece.
20:03The painting's so vast, you almost feel you could fall into it.
20:08But its scale is only part of the secret of its success, I think.
20:12It has a dreamy, seductive, hypnotic quality.
20:16And it sort of makes you understand why it was that when Byrne Jones' friends asked during the 18 years he spent painting it,
20:24What are you doing?
20:25What are you doing?
20:26He said, I'm in Avalon.
20:27It's rather a nice place to be.
20:40Towards the end of his life Byrne Jones wrote,
20:42I need nothing but my hands and my brain To fashion a world to live in which nothing can disturb.
20:51In my own land I am king.
20:54But the world Byrne Jones railed against was gaining unstoppable momentum.
21:15The Victorians had built a nation that was striding boldly into the future.
21:28Machines had brought vast wealth to the country.
21:35In factories, in railways, in mines.
21:44This pumping station was built in 1865 for the distinctly unglamorous job of pumping the sewage away from London.
21:57Crossnes Pumping Station is Victorian engineering at its most confident.
22:04No wonder the writer Thomas Carlyle called his time the age of the machine.
22:14Man was conquering nature.
22:17Britain was conquering the world.
22:19And yet there were increasing numbers of people who found this new power and wealth and knowledge just unsettling.
22:27And they were willing to turn their back on machines altogether.
22:34The artist William Morris built a house for himself and his companions in what was then a village on the outskirts of London.
22:49It was intended as an experiment in communal living because Morris and his friends had ambitions way beyond art.
23:05They wanted to pioneer an entire new way of life.
23:08To do that, they turned their back on traditional Victorian values.
23:12And the fruit of their labours was this, the Red House.
23:15On a cupboard in the hall, they painted pictures of themselves in medieval dress.
23:32William Morris and his young wife Jane.
23:39The painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his lover Lizzie Siddle.
23:44In this ideal world, they would make everything themselves.
23:59They said no to factory-made, mass-produced furniture and wallpaper.
24:05Instead, everything would be crafted by hand, just as in medieval times.
24:27In this hothouse atmosphere, the men painted the women over and over again.
24:34But there's something disturbing about these pictures.
24:38They don't look quite like real women.
24:42They're fantasies with their dreamy expressions.
24:48Their soulful eyes.
24:53And their big, big hair worn sexily loose.
25:01Rossetti's pictures of Lizzie are charged with obsession.
25:06Their images from some feverish, romantic dream.
25:10But the dream ended in nightmare here in Highgate Cemetery in London.
25:20Lizzie was buried here in a private part of the cemetery.
25:39Rossetti's relationship with Lizzie Siddle was intense, passionate and volatile.
25:47She, though, suffered from consumption and became dependent upon the opium-based painkiller, laudanum.
25:53In 1862, two years after they'd been married, she took an overdose.
25:58Suicide was suspected.
25:59Suicide was suspected.
26:00She'd been suffering from postnatal depression after giving birth to a stillborn baby.
26:13Her corpse was laid out in an open coffin for seven days, while Rossetti scanned her body for signs of life.
26:25Inside Lizzie's coffin, entwined in her red hair, he laid the only complete copy of his poetry.
26:33He pledged the poems would die with her.
26:40But the story doesn't end there.
26:41It has a rather grisly postscript.
26:44As the years went by, Rossetti's violent grief subsided, and he began to regret his decision to bury his poetry with his wife.
26:54Seven years after her funeral, in the middle of the night, her grave was opened.
26:59Rossetti himself couldn't bear to be there, but they told him that her body was perfectly preserved
27:05and that the coffin was filled with her luxuriant copper-red hair, which impossibly had carried on growing after she'd died.
27:14The manuscript was worm-eaten, but the poetry was intact.
27:28After her death, he worked obsessively on this painting of her.
27:34Lizzie is deep in a trance-like state. She's deathly pale.
27:47Her lips are slightly parted. Is she breathing or dying?
27:54A strangely coloured dove carries an opium poppy, a symbol of her own death by laudanum overdose.
28:16Yet Rossetti's obsession with his dead wife wasn't so out of step with the times.
28:22The death of Prince Albert in 1861 not only plunged Victoria into mourning, but set off an almost fanatical obsession with death,
28:34which lasted until the end of the century.
28:36As churchyards filled up, the Victorians built grand new cemeteries, extravagant cities of the dead.
28:51Here loved ones lived on, in grand style.
28:55The cult of mourning may have been born of necessity, but it was also the last gasp of a religious age.
29:09No longer sure of an afterlife, it's as if the Victorians decided to cling as long as possible to this one.
29:21The uncertainty of what death brings runs right through the weird paintings of George Frederick Watts.
29:45In this one, sick transit, or thus all things pass, a body lies shrouded on a slab.
30:04The anonymous figure is surrounded by worldly possessions, all now useless.
30:19In love and death, love vainly strives to keep death from entering the house of life.
30:38And in Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus clutches at the body of his beloved.
30:49He has led her from the land of the dead, only to lose her forever by turning back to look at her.
30:57He's been offered what so many Victorians yearned for, the chance to bring the dead back to life.
31:06But he's failed in the attempt.
31:12Many Victorians clung desperately to the belief that perhaps death wasn't the end.
31:17Some even tried to enter the no-man's land between death and life, and to make contact with the other side.
31:24Into the spiritual void opened up by Victorian science came a rush of exotic beliefs and job opportunities for charlatans.
31:42Seances, when mediums allegedly made contact with the dead, became all the rage.
31:59Right, the medium will put their hand on the table.
32:02Before we know it, the table starts to levitate.
32:06Eleanor and Chris Thompson call themselves psychics.
32:10They certainly have an unusual sideline.
32:13An interest in the tricks of the Victorian trade.
32:17Quite blatantly obvious here, but there's a pin.
32:20We've left it blatantly obvious that there is a nail.
32:23They would colour that to match the stain of the table.
32:25It's not as obvious.
32:26And normally the person that checked out the equipment would be someone that knew the medium.
32:31And...
32:32Secondly, the ring.
32:33The ring.
32:34The ring would have grooves or be shaped.
32:38Oh, I see. Yes, yes, yes.
32:39On the outside it looks like a wedding ring and on the inside it's got all these hooks.
32:43Because most of this stuff is trickery, isn't it?
32:46Quite a lot of it is, yes.
32:48If you go back to Victorian times especially, we try and recreate things without the tricks.
32:53You've got some examples of the devices that Victorians used here.
32:58Now what's this?
32:59This is actually a planchette, which is a French fillicle plank.
33:03And all you do is put the pencil in, tighten it up.
33:06So you've then got like a three-legged table, the same sort of table they'd use on the Ouija board.
33:11Now if one person's doing it, it wouldn't be too difficult with a bit of practice to learn to write messages.
33:15So we're very careful to make sure there's more than one person's got the fingers on, so it's more difficult to manipulate.
33:22What interests me about you two is that you know these are tricks.
33:25Yes.
33:26Yes.
33:27It's fakery and it's made easier if people have a hunger to believe there's something out there.
33:32A lot easier, yes.
33:33And yet you do genuinely believe there's something out there.
33:35So how do you describe yourselves now? Are you psychics or what?
33:40We believe we've got a gift.
33:42Helen, what do you describe yourself as?
33:45Psychic or psychotic. I don't know which the jury's still apt on that one.
33:50Why were the Victorians so interested in the paranormal, do you think?
33:53They were desperate for answers. The church didn't control the country anymore.
33:57You couldn't get punished for things. More mediums were out there.
33:59They wanted to find something else.
34:01This need to know what lies the other side of death is the theme of John Everett Milley's Speak, Speak.
34:16A man starts up in his bed as the ghost of his dead wife dressed in her bridal clothes summons him to join her.
34:29The Victorians love the supernatural. Ghosts, spirits, apparitions, visitors from the other side.
34:42But most of all, they love fairies. And they took their fairies very seriously indeed.
35:01Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was a true believer.
35:11His father was a celebrated fairy painter.
35:14Fascination with fairies allowed people to reconnect with a nature
35:42from which they felt they'd been separated.
35:46But it also fed a deep Victorian hunger to believe there was more to life than the merely physical.
35:53That there was some alternative reality.
36:05But even Fairyland had its dark side.
36:08John Anster Fitzgerald's series of nightmare paintings depict dreamers plagued by hideous goblins.
36:27They hold steaming bowls of toxic liquids.
36:31Half-empty medicine bottles, including laudanum, lie on bedside tables.
36:39Late Victorian painters were travelling into ever darker regions.
36:52One of them sought in painting a refuge from the torments of his own mind.
36:57It was one of the strangest stories of the Victorian age.
37:14Richard Dadd was a phenomenally successful fairy painter who was admitted to the Royal Academy at the age of only 20.
37:22But he was highly unstable.
37:27Dad's fragile mental health collapsed during a trip abroad.
37:31He was seized with an urge to attack the Pope and only couldn't carry it through because the Pope was so well protected.
37:39His father insisted he was just suffering from sunstroke.
37:41But then, back home when father and son were walking in the park one day, Richard Dadd grabbed the knife he had bought, especially for the purpose, and slit his father's throat.
37:53He was arrested and found to be suffering from insanity.
38:10In 1864, Richard Dadd was brought here to the new Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
38:29He passed under this arch on a cart almost certainly in chains, and he underwent the admissions process.
38:36Once the mad had been ignored or laughed at, the Victorians put them in huge new hospitals to be cared for and sometimes cured.
38:55Richard Dadd found a kind of refuge here.
39:06Copies of his paintings still hang on the hospital walls.
39:11He was admitted by the hospital superintendent, Dr William Orange.
39:15This is Dr Orange's initial report of Richard Dadd.
39:23Tongue broad and flabby.
39:25Tongue broad and flabby, pulse regular, heart's action normal, has never had syphilis, still believes himself to be a marked man under the influence of an evil spirit.
39:35And in explaining his ideas, he becomes very much excited and occasionally his eyes have a wild appearance.
39:44We probably describe him now as being a paranoid schizophrenic.
39:49And then this next entry?
39:52He employs himself generally in painting and is at present engaged on a watercolour fairy scene, which he is executing with great care.
40:03Was he encouraged to paint while he was here?
40:06I think he was encouraged.
40:08I think there was a good tradition in that era of patients being encouraged to be distracted with activity that maybe suited their personality.
40:18And for him, he'd always been a fine artist and it seems right that that would be encouraged.
40:23So it was a sort of therapy?
40:24I believe so.
40:25And in the same way today we use art, music and other distractions in therapeutic pursuit in exactly the same way.
40:34Richard Dadd spent the last 22 years of his life here in Broadmoor.
40:49He was incarcerated in one of these rooms and he was given another one to paint him.
40:55By the latter stages of his life, he was pretty much forgotten about.
40:59In fact, many people thought he died long ago.
41:02But he left behind a body of work that is astonishing in its intensity.
41:07His most famous picture is a fairy scene depicting what exactly?
41:28It's a mouse eye view seen from ground level through the grass.
41:39A fairy woodman raises his axe to strike a nut.
41:43Around him, strange figures watch or indeed ignore his attempt.
42:04The deranged details of this interior world are unfathomable.
42:13Richard Dadd's were dark and very private visions.
42:20But there was another more optimistic dream that chimed with the public mood.
42:34A fantasy of imperial greatness.
42:37By the second half of Victoria's reign, Britain ruled an empire four times the size of that of ancient Rome.
42:56In the eyes of many, Victorian Britain rivaled Rome in nobility and sophistication.
43:02Here at the British Museum, the glories of the classical world had been gathered for them to admire.
43:21The world of ancient Greece and Rome offered the Victorians a mirror in which they saw themselves reflected back.
43:27But their interpretation of the classical world has a distinctly Victorian twist to it.
43:42This Victorian painting imagines the moment when a classical Greek sculptor shows his newly finished work to the public.
43:48They're dressed in classical robes, of course, but they could easily be Victorian middle-class art lovers at a private view.
43:59They stroll around sizing up the work with everyone chatting away looking like they're having a thoroughly pleasant and civilized afternoon.
44:10These apparent Romans are really Victorians at ease with themselves at home.
44:25In the bath.
44:29And quite often in nothing at all.
44:31In the bath.
44:40Paintings and sculptures of nudes had fallen from favor in the prudish mid-Victorian years.
44:47But the obsession with the classical past allowed the naked body to make a triumphant return.
44:53Here's the surgery of the Greek god of medicine.
45:01Doctor, it's my foot!
45:04His remarkably fit-looking patients have taken the helpful precaution of stripping off before they queue up for their prescription.
45:12This was the great age of the collector, men who'd made their pile and now wanted to spend some of it on works of art.
45:25What they were after was something with a hint of sophistication.
45:28Anything which had mythical heroes, gods, goddesses, especially goddesses, would fit the bill perfectly.
45:34The man who built this splendid Victorian house in Bournemouth was a canny businessman who made his money in property.
45:55Merton Russell Coates was a passionate collector of a very particular kind of art.
46:18For Russell Coates it really mattered that any suggestion of sauciness in his splendid collection be firmly squashed.
46:39So he referred to his nudes as The Human Form Divine.
46:43divine in other words these weren't earthly or fleshy figures they were godlike defenders of
46:52the nude insisted that these painted figures weren't real women they represented an ideal
47:01so a painting of a naked goddess was one thing
47:05a painting of a naked mrs jones from next door would be quite another
47:09a favorite subject was the classical story of andromeda chained to a rock
47:20though to our perhaps jaded eyes there might seem to be more than a hint of bondage about this picture
47:28if naked women looked more like classical statues than real people polite society could find no
47:35fault with them the trouble was how could you be sure that only polite society got to see them
47:45the common victorian belief that art was good for you ran into some real problems with these paintings
47:52i know only too well how the rough and his female companion behave in front of these pictures
47:59complained one critic i have seen the gangs of workmen strolling around and know that their
48:05artistic interest in the studies of the nude is emphatically embarrassing
48:10this painting the dawn of love by william etty shows the goddess of love venus and her winged messenger
48:29cupid who seems to be having a bit of a nap on her bed russell coates was very proud of this painting
48:35but some members of the public weren't so sure and they wrote to the local paper about it
48:42in civilized life wrote an angry gentleman the dawn of love real love is seldom heralded in with clothes
48:50off that prompted one art lover to respond did anyone ever see the dawn of love come into the world with
48:58clothes on
49:10bathers alarmed there's a sense looking at some of these paintings that the victorian interest in sex
49:17which had hitherto been kept pretty strictly under control was now really straining at the leash
49:23perhaps was about to slip it all together
49:38as the century approached its end for some people at least the firm foundations upon which victorian
49:45society had been built were beginning to crack decades of religious doubt huge social changes and
49:52the general weariness at stern moral teaching were changing the way people felt about the old order
50:03a new group of artists led the charge producing work that was grotesque provocative decadent
50:13the new generation used to meet here in the ornate rooms and bar of the cafe royal
50:18men like oscar wilde and aubrey beardsley their lovers male and female loved everything that was
50:26exotic shocking or scandalous
50:33what the so-called decadence adored about the cafe royal was its exaggerated almost absurd air of luxury
50:40about as far from the stifling conventions of the victorian home as it was possible to get
50:56if you want to see the english people at their most english said one writer go to the cafe royal
51:03where they're trying their hardest to be french at the heart of this group of artists was the young
51:13aubrey beardsley his illustrations for oscar wilde's play salome and his erotic drawings are as
51:20unsettling as modern and as shocking as they must have seemed a hundred years ago
51:25like other victorians who had fallen out of love with corsets and moral homilies
51:35beardsley created another world quite different from that of the respectable middle class
51:55and his pictures were deliberately designed to disturb
52:16depraved
52:21macabre
52:26sinister
52:29that was what some people said of them
52:32reflected too in the group's drink of choice the notoriously potent absinthe
52:40so what's all the paraphernalia then
52:43well what we have here is a a traditional absinthe glass and as you'll see there there's a clearly
52:50sort of demarcated area for the absinthe dose and this is typical of absinthe that you use a sort of
52:55drug-like term
52:57dose and that's been used for a century you wouldn't really say a dose of gin or a dose of whiskey
53:02but you place a perforated spoon like this
53:05it's got a little notch to grip the edge of the glass and you put a sugar cube
53:08a spoon like that the iced water drips over the sugar cube and it dissolves the sugar cube slowly
53:18as the water reaches the absinthe or mixes with the absinthe
53:22you'll see it start to change color it gets a sort of opalescent milky kind of color there
53:28little sort of swirls of it happening there that you can see now
53:30it's popular image is almost as a narcotic something that really does your brain in
53:38essentially the most by far the most dangerous thing in absinthe is the alcohol
53:51is it i'm rather lost for words because there's all sorts of different tastes in there exactly
53:59all sorts of different tastes i shouldn't care to spend the evening on it oh i don't know it
54:04i'd much rather have a whiskey
54:21the last decade of the century came to be known as the naughty 90s
54:27if duty and morality had been the watchwords of victorian britain at its height
54:33now others could be added freedom and fun what had happened was that ordinary people
54:42in this case middle-class ordinary people could now enjoy the fruits of their labors
54:47they could take pleasure seriously
54:50all that invention and industry had brought wealth and leisure enjoying yourself was no longer just for
55:08the tops
55:13the values which had made victorian britain great and grand were slowly but surely being laid aside
55:20in this case when victoria died after 63 years on the throne film cameras were there
55:38to record her funeral on the 2nd of february 1901
55:55the coming of cinema spelled the end for the sort of storytelling pictures that victorian artists
56:12had painted for so long but the legacy of those pictures is astonishing
56:17they had charted the explosion of the great cities
56:25and how the victorians had transformed them and learned to love them
56:29they had painted the victorian dream of home sweet home
56:41and the dangers that menaced it
56:50they'd created hymns to the labor and ingenuity that made britain the workshop of the globe
56:58acted as cheerleaders for the empire as britain conquered the world
57:03and as compassionate witnesses to the hardships of the workers whose labor had made britain rich
57:16they had pushed at the boundaries of victorian conformity
57:23and provided comfort for the troubled victorian soul
57:27their pictures of the most dramatic feverish time in our history were the cinema of their day
57:39and they're still all around us they're hanging on a wall near you
57:57on bbc radio for the return of the wreath lectures kwame anthony apia addresses the question of
58:04nationhood tomorrow morning at nine and for more on the victorians enter the world of the victorian slum
58:10on bbc iplayer but next tonight here on bbc four our epic series on the great war continues
58:16as religious extremism comes to the fore stay with us
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